It seems that cloudflare is trying to create an internet-wide agent identity platform in general. I have seem few attempts at “agent identity” but they were all intrinsically limited to a particular system. An identity AWS IAM assigns to an agent isn’t gonna work on rottentomatos.com or techcrunch.com.

This was always a vaguely desired thing, but the implementation details was always a form of OIDC federation which is mind-numbingly complex and not worth the hassle. Just shove an api key or a shared secret of some sort and move on. Only accounts that are very high value targets for attacks (cloud infra accounts, CIs infra, billing, and things they interact with implement OIDC federation. But that awesome Thai recipe blog has no chance of implementing something like that.

With Agents driving internet traffic, there is a desire to have identities for them. And since it’s inherently easy for them to leak these identities (look at the million sandbox solutions that all share the same dumb goal of “protect the API Key or password”), having short lived tokens for everything (AWS IAM or Azure Managed Identity like) simplifies the entire process. Agreeing on the single IdP was the problem, there are like 40 (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, even GitHub, and Amazon have SSO not to mention all the regional specific ones)

There is a legitimate need for that, and it looks like cloudflare figured if they are that “internet agent identity provider”, then there is a lot of power and control over the internet and AI use in general.

Someone has already reserved my very unique company name and a bunch of variants.

Without domain validation, what is this user's intention other than fraud/impersonation?

I've already got an active impersonator running a website under my brand name and confusing my customers.

It feels like Cloudflare keeps inserting itself in between everything, everywhere it can. So convenient you'll middleman yourself. I do not like this.

Cloudflare is certainly making a full court press to provide infra for the agentic web. My own ability to see whats coming also believes we need wallets, agent protocols, cloud services for agents, etc. So, maybe this is the way.

At the same time, something tells me what is coming isn't going to be as recognizable as these products build for.

Read most of the article, still not sure why we need this. Is this a stablecoin bank for agents?

If so, why not interact with an exchange?

Also, not sure how many merchants out there accept stablecoins. Probably not many.

What a stupid move! So, you have a Workers subdomain, a Zero Trust subdomain, and now a Wallet subdomain - one company with random handles! Cloudflare does not get identity!

This is interesting but how do site operators cash out? Is is non-custodial only like binance?

Cloudflare's in a good position to be an agent infra provider. Durable objects and serverless/workers are great agent primitives.

It makes sense that they're leaning into an all-in-one platform play, i.e. if you use DOs, you might as well use our wallet/sandbox/AI gateway/etc. too.

Agentic commerce is such an interesting space!

Alipay and Coinbase already have similar offerings in market.

Related:

Web Security is Too Hard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172834